Tag Archives: World War Two

Again, no time to write a blog so, again, some extracts from my e-diary, this time in 2001:

MONDAY 26th MARCH, 2001

An Italian archaeologist told me a true story from the Western Desert in World War Two.

In some battle between the Eighth Army and the Afrika Corps, a British tank got hit by a shell which wrecked the tank and embedded itself in it but did not explode. There was no way out for the crew. The British won the battle and, afterwards, the British (presumably the Royal Engineers) tried to get into the tank to see if any of the crew were still alive. It took time but, when they opened up a hole, the first thing they saw was the tank commander sitting back, relaxed, smoking a pipe and surrounded by high explosive shells and the bodies of his dead crew. He had tried everything to get out but found he couldn’t. So, as he knew there was nothing he could do, he lit up his pipe.

TUESDAY 27th MARCH

I was in a tube train coming home. A mad man started talking in a very sane and reasonable tone of voice to the whole carriage:

“My house,” he said. “It’s so big. It’s worth four and a half million pounds… Do you want some spuds?”

As he continued, in the same very reasonable tone of voice, a blind man came into the carriage and his brow furrowed, confused at the sane-sounding man saying strange things which had – without sight – no context in which he could put them.

WEDNESDAY 28th MARCH

A Bournemouth film student told me:

I used to walk past two women every day who stood on their doorsteps in all weathers and gossiped about the people on the street. Once they told my dad that they liked his new coffee table – despite never having been in our house!

THURSDAY 29th MARCH

In the evening, BBC1 had paid £280,000 for a one hour interview with gangster Reggie Kray, recorded a few days before his death. Reggie said that he killed Jack The Hat McVitie because the man “was a vexation to the spirit”. Of the killing, he said: “I wanted to do it neater than I did, but I didn’t get round to it.”

FRIDAY 30th MARCH

At lunchtime, I went to see a fan of imprisoned criminal Charles Bronson. Her entire bedroom walls and the walls of her upstairs rooms were covered with immensely detailed pastel-covered drawings and poems by Charlie himself. Downstairs, two massive light brown dogs with squashed black faces slept in the kitchen and the living room walls were covered with pictures of dogs, dog breeding certificates and a framed cartoon drawing of Laurel & Hardy.

A female friend of hers was also there. The friend mentioned that her mother (the friend’s mother) was obsessed by motor racing driver Damon Hill. In her living room, she has a tyre from a Formula One racing car, signed by Damon Hill, which she has made into a coffee table by simply putting a sheet of glass on top of it. She occasionally talks to the wheel and, when the family go out in their car, she has a life-size cut-out of Damon Hill who sits in the front passenger seat (with a seat belt round it) while she drives and her husband and daughter sit in the rear seat.

“I did comedy for two years and then I stopped because my sister died and I stopped finding anything funny,” actress and comedian Kate Cook told me.

“But didn’t you have to laugh because it was so awful?” I said. “As catharsis?”

“I tried. But I stopped doing comedy and then it was difficult to get back into it psychologically – dragging myself out there again. But, now I am doing it again, I’m really loving it.”

I met Kate Cook at the Soho Theatre Bar in London.

“You are an actress and a stand-up,” I said: “Kate Copstick recently told me she could never be a stand-up comic, because you have to be yourself. Actors are the opposite.”

“I have to say,” Kate Cook said, “that I do find it very difficult being myself when I’m doing stand-up comedy – to just be myself and to tear down that barrier between me and the audience.”

“I think,” I suggested, “that you can very often tell the difference between someone who is a comedian by nature and an actor who is performing as a comedian.”

“I suppose,” suggested Kate, “that comedians do act the comedy differently. They’re maybe a bit more ramshackle, whereas actors are a bit more prepared and anal and they have to tear down that prepared analness.”

Doodle and Bug were Harriet Williams (left) and Kate Cook

“I think comedians tend to make good actors,”I said, “because it’s all about the timing, but actors sometimes become very cardboard comedians. They spout the lines but there isn’t that genuine madness within them.”

“But there are a few actors on the comedy scene,” said Kate. “So it can work.”

“I’m usually not keen on character comedy,” I said.

“I think in the stand-up comedy scene,” said Kate, “maybe sometimes character doesn’t work so well because the fun of comedy is that it’s so raw and spontaneous and the comedian is connecting with you whereas, with a character, it’s all a bit fourth wally.

“But, if you’re an actress AND do stand-up, they help each other. You get massive confidence from doing stand-up comedy – connecting with the audience.

“I’m going to do a one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe this year called Invisible Woman.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I’m obsessed by women in World War II…”

“A few years ago,” I said, “you…”

“Yes,” said Kate. “I wrote and devised this thing called Doodle and Bug – I was Lady Penelope Bug. I devised it with my friend Harriet Williams, who is an opera singer. She was my housekeeper Mrs Dorothy Doodle. We did a few cabaret venues and festivals and a couple of spoof Ministry of Information films that are on YouTube.”

“Why the big interest in World War II?” I asked.

“I love the innocence of the era and I love the heroics of the women. I love all those stories about the Resistance and spies. I’ve been reading the Mass-Observation archive and there’s one diary in that I really love – This well-to-do woman who lives in Maida Vale and she’s a widow with two children and she loved the War. She really found it thrilling and exciting and was desperate to help but kept getting thwarted. She failed her ambulance-driving test. You would think they’d be so desperate they would take anyone. She had servants and she was always horrible about her servants.”

“Is she in your play?”

“I wanted her to be, but she’s not a very likeable protagonist. So I have turned her into a man and made the whole show about his downtrodden housewife who then becomes a spy for the Resistance.”

Cross-dressing and invisibility are standard

“This is set in France?” I asked.

“No. They’re a couple who live in London and he has a wooden leg because he is a World War I veteran. And he’s a bully and they have a 15-year-old daughter who’s a bit of a dreamer. The woman can’t get a job and the husband sends her away to stay with her mother and while she’s there – because she’s half-French – she gets spotted by the War Office and becomes a spy for the Resistance, where she finds love, freedom and adventure. Meanwhile, the one-legged husband is trapping the daughter.”

“You play the wife?” I asked.

“No. I’m going to play everybody except the main character – the Invisible Woman. She never appears. She is brought to life by everyone around her.”

“So the characters you play,” I said, “include the one-legged husband – always good value for money in a comedy. Do you have any previous experience of playing one-legged husbands?”

“No,” laughed Kate, “But it’s always been my dream.”

“To be a one-legged man?” I asked.

“Yeah. And I’m going to have a pipe as well. I’m developing the play with Gerry Flanagan, the Artistic Director of Shifting Sands Theatre.

“I’ve written the story and we’re going to pull it apart and make it come to life for the stage. There are two previews of it at the Hen & Chickens Theatre in London in March and I’m taking it Brighton Fringe for three days in May. Then it’s at Just The Tonic at the Edinburgh Fringe in August.”

“Does the audience see the wooden leg?” I asked.

“No. They imagine it. This whole play is about imagining. You’re imagining the main character. You’re imagining the adventure.”

Kate Cook – a phone + an interesting concept

“The invisible woman is never present?” I asked.

“She’s there,” explained Kate. “She’s there throughout, but everyone is reacting to her. The audience will be the invisible woman. At the beginning, her husband is talking to her. Then she goes off and her mother is talking to her and she goes over to France and is interviewed and…”

“So,” I said, “ when her husband is talking to her, he is talking to the audience?”

“Yes. That’s the idea.”

“So she and the audience are the object of monologues?”

“Except,” explained Kate, “that, occasionally, I play two or three characters talking to one and other.”

“So how long have you been in therapy?” I asked.

“Maybe,” laughed Kate, “this is working as therapy.”

“How is the other acting going?” I asked.

Weird Weather – coming soon to a Vault

“I’m doing a play in March at the Vault Festival in London. It’s a play called Weird Weather, written by Matt Cunningham.”

“Are you playing the title role?” I asked.

“No,” said Kate. “It’s about love, relationships, family and teenage angst, but it’s funny. It’s a funny play. Matt is a good writer.”

“Do you prefer comic acting?” I asked. “I can see you as Lady Macbeth.”

“That would be good,” said Kate. “I would like to be really evil or funny.”

“You have the dark looks of The Wicked Queen in Snow White,” I suggested.

Yesterday, in response to my blog mentioning farteur Mr Methane, Jackie Hunter, former features editor of The Scotsman newspaper, reminded me that early 20th-century artist Maxfield Parrish painted a fart into a mural that now adorns the famous King Cole Bar in New York’s St Regis hotel. I have to agree with her that painting a fart is quite an achievement.

Yesterday was a funny old mixture of a day because British comedians are now planning for the Edinburgh Fringe in August. Going to the Fringe, like having a baby, is a nine-month project involving a lot of nausea, pain and uncertain results.

Charlie Chuck phoned me about his planned return to Edinburgh which sounds suitably unusual and the extraordinarily multi-talented Janey Godley, not planning to play the Edinburgh Fringe this year but just about to go to the Adelaide Fringe, told me about two possibilities she has been unexpectedly offered in two totally different media. From Janey, the unexpected comes as no surprise.

In the afternoon, I had to take a friend to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich which, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, is surrounded by a high Grade A security fence which makes it look more like a Stalag Luft Queen Elizabeth II escape-proof prison camp in World War II or a Ministry of Defence site in the Cold War.

In the evening, I went to Vivienne & Martin Soan’s monthly Pull The Other One comedy club at the beleaguered and now closed Ivy House pub in Nunhead. The venue was re-opened specially for the night to stage Pull The Other One with this month’s headliner Jo Brand.

Vivienne & Martin now have their next six shows arranged but with no definite venue and are looking round, although they would prefer to stay at the warmly ornate and atmospheric mirrored ‘golden room’ behind the Ivy House bar. One local alternative might be The Old Waiting Room at Peckham Rye Station.

Comedian and novelist Dominic Holland, making his second appearance at Pull The Other One called it “the weirdest gig that exists,” which it surely is. The format is about two hours of variety acts and two stand-up comics. Unusually, nowadays, the bizarre variety acts – far be it from me to name-drop Bob Slayer and Holly Burn – are as important to the feel of the shows as the stand-ups.

Afterwards, Dominic told me that his 14-year-old son Tom Holland, recently on stage as Billy Elliot in the West End, is currently in Thailand filming a lead role in major Hollywood blockbuster The Impossible. I thought Dominic was probably ‘talking up’ this film out of fatherly pride until I looked it up on IMDB Pro and found it is a big-budget tsunami disaster movie “starring Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland” and is one of the “most anticipated films of 2011”.

Other shocks of the evening were that the much talked-about cult comedian Dr Brown has got an entirely new character act in which he actually moves and talks semi-coherently. And I heard that legendary ‘open spot’ act Jimbo – he seems to have been doing open spots as long as Cilla Black has been acting-out the role of ordinary woman next door – is now getting paid gigs, has allegedly changed into a (different) character act and is perhaps going to the Edinburgh Fringe. If he won an award as Best Newcomer at the Fringe it would be very funny and would be a triumph for Brian Damage of Pear Shaped, who has long championed Jimbo and other – even by my standards – very, very bizarre acts.

A very funny night at Pull The Other One ended very entertainingly but totally unsurprisingly with nudity. There were even some calls for The Naked Balloon Dance of fond memory.

Meanwhile, out in the real world, Tunisia continued to stumble around like a blinded meerkat towards potential anarchic chaos and tanks were rolling around Cairo to prevent what threatened to be a popular uprising.

Is it my imagination or have things deteriorated badly in that area since the United Nations, evidently an organisation with no sense of irony, appointed Tony Blair as Middle East Peace Envoy and why is it I never actually see any pictures of him in the Middle East?

Could it be he’s just too busy talking to God and this week, according to The Times, signing a six-figure deal to make four speeches for a hedge fund which made around £100 million by betting on the collapse of the Northern Rock bank in the UK?

This was shortly after the Daily Mail reported that he got £300,000 for making one speech for banking giant Goldman Sachs, while he had a £2.5 million deal as “advisor” to JP Morgan, who, according to London’s Evening Standard, won a contract to set up an Iraqi bank in the wake of the US-led invasion.

Which gets us back to the subject of Mr Methane and farting around the world and brings up the possibly pertinent question:

I had lunch last week with the highly entertaining Derek Hobson, host of ITV’s seminal talent show New Faces, which was responsible for the ‘discovery’ of Michael Barrymore, the wonderful Marti Caine, Jim Davidson, Les Dennis, Lenny Henry, Victoria Wood etc in the pre-Thatcher 1970s. He reminded me about the old union-dominated days at ATV (where I worked a various times). Lenny Henry was chosen by the producers to be on New Faces and it made him a star, but it took a whole year before he was seen on screen because the unions only allowed card-carrying Equity or Musicians’ Union members to appear on the show.

Derek told me that, when Yorkshire TV recorded its classic sitcom Rising Damp, which was screened on ITV as six-part series, the company used to schedule recordings for seven episodes per series on the basis that one entire episode would always be lost due to Luddite practices during the recordings by the all-powerful ACTT union. I well remember their pre-Thatcher power. The ACTT was less a union protecting its members, more a protection racket threatening employers and running a heavily enforced closed shop.

As a member of the National Union of Journalists at ATV, I suggested a documentary to be transmitted on the 40th anniversary of the 1940 Wartime bombing of Coventry (and provided research and sources) but I was not allowed to be employed nor credited as a researcher on the show because I was not an ACTT member and researchers could only be ACTT members.

Derek also told me the story of a singer who triumphantly performed on one edition of New Faces, wowing the judges, the studio audience and the viewers at home. The response was immense. On the Monday after the show was transmitted, the singer received a phone call from the manager of two of the biggest music acts of the time – acts with a similar style. The manager wanted to sign the singer to an exclusive management contract. The singer was overwhelmed and flattered to be approached by the high-profile and highly successful manager; he thought his career was made and his life would be transformed. But, in fact, the manager wanted to sign the singer because he saw a potential threat to his two existing acts. The singer was too similar; he was given ten duff songs in a row to record, his potential career was destroyed and the manager’s two existing acts continued to prosper with no threat of competition.

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